Vehicles operating in an autonomous mode (e.g., driverless) can relieve occupants, especially the driver, from some or all driving-related responsibilities. When operating in an autonomous mode, the vehicle can navigate to various locations using onboard sensors, allowing the vehicle to travel with minimal human interaction or in some cases without any passengers.
With the introduction of artificial intelligence algorithms for autonomous driving designs, a hardware platform for an autonomous vehicle that requires a large amount of compute accelerators, such as specialized processors, FPGAs, and GPUs, in order to deliver the compute capacity required by the software algorithms, which is traditionally accomplished by having several computers to host and interconnect over Ethernet. It also needs to accommodate the airflow within a vehicle trunk which generally flows downwardly (then out) while providing adequate cooling to all components, package into a compact form factor to fit in small car trunks for smaller cars on the market, connect to many different type of sensors, and provide system wide high precision time synchronization. Conventional models tend to be small configurations that do not support the amount of compute power and were designed without much thermal consideration of car trunk environment.